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Books by Wilson
Jeremiah Moses
Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925 (1988) /
The Wings of Ethiopia
(1990)
Alexander
Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent
(1992) /
Destiny & Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898
(1992)
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (1993)
Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa
Narratives from the 1850s
/
Afrotopia: The Roots of African American
Popular History
(2002)
Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004)
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Thomas Friedman? Benjamin Franklin?
Which do you Trust?
By Wilson J. Moses
November 26, 2008
Thomas Friedman,
the author of "All
Fall Down" NY Times (Nov 25, 08) often gets
things wrong, before getting them half-right. He is
unfair in placing any blame for this real estate bubble
on the "People who had no business buying a home, with
nothing down and nothing to pay for two years." People
who fall into that category are of ordinary
intelligence, and have need, as we all do, of "the
kindness of strangers," in order to survive. Although
some people with IQs of 90 are capable of grasping
household microeconomics, others with IQs above 140 are
not. Our current crisis provides incontrovertible
evidence that, most Americans, including college
graduates with high achievements on standardized tests,
lack a basic understanding of saving and investment.
Benjamin Franklin created
Poor Richard's Almanack to teach many things,
among these, a non-confrontational class-consciousness,
an appreciation for saving, and an awareness that
personal prosperity sometimes, if not always, requires a
moderate parsimony. Serviceable as it is, few Americans
today can put Poor Richard's common-sense ethic into
practice, to guide an enlightened self interest.
It is thus necessary and proper for a civilized nation
to sustain such structures as fire departments, public
schools, a well-regulated banking system, social
security, and public health, in order to protect the
masses, both bright and dim, from clever but
unscrupulous risk-takers.
Another category of Friedman culprits, "people who had
no business pushing such mortgages," did not for the
most part make "fortunes doing so." Most of these are
people of mediocre understanding, honest, but credulous,
who work at the local bank on Main Street. These people
also lack class consciousness and have never learned
from Poor Richard's catechism how to serve their own
interests. These people did not make millions, but
currently find themselves in danger of losing their
homes, victims of their own irrational exuberance and
blind faith in the conventional wisdom of their leaders.
Friedman's third category, the people who were "bundling
those loans into securities and selling them to third
parties," are somewhat more culpable. These products
of the Wharton, Chicago, and Stanford MBA programs, and
lesser institutions, are capable of understanding their
errors, and might have known better, but they are so
lacking in creativity, imagination, and skepticism
(despite their vaunted grade point averages and
standardized test scores) that they really are not to
blame either. They were simply following the teachings
of their mentors in business school. They are
ideologically screwed up and dreadfully spoiled, but not
bad people at heart. It is simply that the typical MBA
began with the intelligence of a playboy bunny, and was
further dumbed-down by their business school.
More to blame are
the professors, in the humanities and social sciences,
who abandon the field of political economy to a few
"experts" in the "appropriate departments." We stick
to our syllabi, and allow our students to be misled that
the reforms of the New Deal were the cause, not the cure
of the Great Depression of 1929-1940. We fear to
confront our colleagues who "validate" their positions
with mathematical models, so elegant as to outdo the
most artful constructions of classical and medieval
astronomers. These hire teams of graduate students to
crunch numbers to "prove" that the sun circles the
earth, and the rest of the planets move in exotic
epicycles.
Mathematicians and
physicists, are thus blamable because, despite the
lessons of the Long Term Capital debacle of the 1990's,
they collaborated in the credit swap fantasies,
inventing hypothetical choirs of angels to dance on the
heads of hypothetical pins. Professors in the liberal
arts and sciences betrayed ourselves and our students by
our cowardly silence. A little faith in our own common
sense might have led us at least to suggest, that the
empire's clothiers were half-naked themselves.
These sorcerers and their Mickey Mouse grad students
have interests overlapping those of their Wall Street
chums, who did indeed make a lot of money from pumping
up the real estate balloon. Also culpable are the
Federal Reserve bankers, the Secretaries of the
Treasury, the House and Senate committee members, whose
buddies marketed and rated the bonds, sold them, bought
them, refused to regulate them, and convinced ordinary
people that unrestrained price inflation (whether in
real estate, commodities, or securities) is inevitable,
eternal, and benevolent.
There are plenty of Americans who really do try to live
within their means; people who are content to have
fixed-rate, 30-year mortgages at reasonable rates, who
establish monthly budgets, who drive modest cars for a
decade or more, pay their taxes, and try to accumulate
capital by thrift and saving.
Controlled inflation can be beneficial to small
capitalists, small farmers, and even to wage earning
people. Benjamin Franklin realized as much when, at the
age of twenty-one, he called for an increase in the
colonial money supply. But the American dream of a
perpetually expanding "South Sea Bubble" of the sort
that Mr. Henry Paulson and his Wall Street cronies seek
to restore is unrealistic.
Americans' realistic expectations during our most
prosperous era, were solidly grounded in the Henry Ford
principle of a living wage, and the Thomas Malthus
principle of public spending towards development of
public infrastructure. No restoration of economic
security will be possible if we start with the
assumption that these principles, which eventually came
to be called "Keynesianism,"
have been entirely discredited.
The Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower economy provided a
factory worker with a thirty year mortgage at 8%. It
also provided a four percent return on a pass book
account at a Main Street bank. An eighth grade graduate
could afford to send two or three children to college,
without taking out loans, and a young couple could
afford a 20% down payment on their first home. Evolving
world conditions may never allow for America to revert
to that economy,
Thanks to
Reaganomics, the Roosevelt structure has been so
mindlessly vandalized that Eisenhower Era expectations
are no longer realistic. But whatever the cause of our
present ills, no cure will be found in the
pseudo-patriotic bravado of so-called "conservative"
think tanks, or in the pep talks of MSNBC pundits. Any
solution must be found in a completely new appreciation
of those areas of the economy that are actually
productive, including industry, agriculture,
communications, transportation, and trade. We need
producers like Ford and Rockefeller, Carnegie and Bill
Gates, who despite their predatory tendencies, at least
create material industries.
Finance is not an
industry but a service, where we do not need those who
commit the semantical crime of referring to securitized
mortgages as "products." The demand of the hour is not
for buccaneers or risk-takers, but for sober anti-inflationists
like
Nicholas Biddle and J. P. Morgan to guard against
the speculative borrow-and-spend bubbles that
accompanied Reagan's voodoo economics.
Friedman states an
obvious and almost redundant truth, obvious to at least
some of us. The system is broken, and the American
dream, insofar as it is based on a perpetual spiral of
borrowing to speculate, is completely unrealistic.
Friedman admits that certain irrational aspects of the
dream may not be retrievable in the short run. My
reading of
Poor Richard's Almanack leads me to the
common-sense assumption that they are not realizable in
the long run either.
Copyright©2008 by
Wilson J. Moses
Source:
http://wilsonmoses.wordpress.com/
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Speak My Name
Black Men on Masculinity and the
American Dream
Edited by Don
Belton
It is rare in
America for African-American men to have the
opportunity to express who they are, what they
think, or how they feel. As the nemesis in the
American psyche, they have been silenced by an image
that is at once celebrated and maligned. In this
first anthology of contemporary African-American
men's writing, black men share their experiences as
the revered and reviled of America. Through the
voices of some of today's most prominent
African-American writers, including August Wilson,
John Edgar Wideman,
Derrick Bell, and
Walter Mosley,
Speak My Name explores the intimate
territory behind the myths about black masculinity.
These intensely personal essays and stories reveal
contemporary black men from the vantage point of
their own lives - as men with proper names,
distinctive faces, and strong family ties. |
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Writing about everything from
"How it Feels to Be a Problem" to relationships
between fathers and sons, these men reveal to us
both great courage and in an amazing love for each
other and themselves. In a stunning tribute to a
centuries-old brotherhood of heroes, black men come
together to challenge America finally to see them as
individuals, to hear their long-silenced voices—to
speak their names.
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This diverse anthology,
mainly of original essays, serves as an excellent counterpoint
to media stereotypes of black men. Topics include black male
images, relations with women, family life and heroism. Some
favorites: soft-voiced scholar
Robin D.G. Kelley recounts how his newly shaved head scared
people; novelist
Randall Kenan recalls a mysterious, kind and loving mentor;
Quinn Eli faces the tendency of black men to accuse black women
of not being supportive; filmmaker
Isaac Julien and poet
Essex Hemphill debate whether black unity can include gay
men; novelist
Walter Mosley muses about why his PI protagonist, Easy
Rawlins, needs the backup of the remorseless killer Mouse to
survive in an oppressive world. Belton, a former reporter for
Newsweek who teaches at Macalester College, contributes his own
touching effort, which treats the gap between himself and the
ghetto-trapped nephew he loves.—Publishers
Weekly
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Black masculinity has built
and shaped America. It is an old story which our fathers taught
us; it is measured by their quiet dignity as well as their
fears. What is heroic about
Speak My Name
is the fact that the contributors are men who decided to become
writers. They all made the decision to use words instead of
fists. They are writers shaped by the 1960s, like Arthur
Flowers, who writes:
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And, understand, the 60s were more than street
battles or sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the 60s
were about commitment. We cared. We tried. It was
important (and do-able) for us to make a better
world. It was important to save the race. And it
still is. |
While our society still
attempts to come to grips with the lyrics of tappers, Don
Belton's book is a gift which offers insight into how a few
Black men think and feel. For sisters who are still waiting to
exhale, it serves as testimony that there are good men in the
world and we only have to speak their names.
Belton's purpose for
editing the volume was to "experience a richer sense of
community and communion among other Black male writers." This is
evident in the interview conducted by Lewis Edwards of
Albert Murray. Here, a young writer sits at the feet of an
elder with an acknowledgment of inheritance and a respect for
tradition. When Murray (author of
The Omni-Americans and
Train Whistle Guitar) talks about his friendship with
Ralph Ellison during their days at Tuskegee, he conveys to
Edwards how two Black men enjoyed reading and developing their
intellect.
Speak My Name
, according to Belton, is structured in "jazz music's
compositional model of theme and variation, giving my
contributors a series of extended solos that develop toward
visions of masculinity as a struggle for hope." Belton divides
his book into five sections, although these categories are
unnecessary. One can enjoy the entire volume the way one
appreciates the old Ornette Coleman "Free Jazz" album; just open
the door to the studio and let the brothers play. The music will
find its own center.— Black
Issues in Higher Education, March 7, 1996 by E. Ethelbert
Miller—FindArticles
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Race Men
By Hazel V.
Carby
Race men is a
term of endearment used by blacks to signify those
high-achieving African American men who "represent
the race," disproving bigoted notions of black
inferiority. In this engaging study, Yale African
American Studies Professor Hazel V. Carby seeks to
ask "questions about various black masculinities at
different historical moments and in different media:
literature, photography, film, music, and song." She
does so by discussing the lives and works of myriad
types of race men. Frederick Douglass's
uncompromising fight against slavery, W. E. B. Du
Bois's masterful
The Souls of Black Folk,
Martin Luther King's nonviolent struggles, and
Malcolm X's fiery rhetoric articulate the
intellectual-political prisms of black activism, for
example, while actor
Danny Glover represents the dilemma of the
black/white sidekick and the fight for a more
multidimensional Afro-American image. |
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Carby compares
Toussaint L'Ouverture, the ex-slave who liberated Haiti from
the French in the 19th century, to Trinidadian writer
C.L.R. James, whose Marxist interpretation of the Haitian
Revolution, the
Black Jacobins, unveiled the complexities of
colonialism, class, and the sexist aspects of radical black
leadership. She discusses jazz icon
Miles Davis's quest for freedom and his misogynistic persona
articulated in his autobiography, then praises science fiction
writer Samuel R. Delany's
Motion of Light in Water as "an effective counterpoint
to Miles ... a magnificent attempt to reject the socially
created obstacles separating desire from its material
achievement, and in the process demolishing and transcending the
limitations of heterosexual norms."
Indeed, for Carby the major flaw of race
men is that their upholding of "the race" does not prominently
address the concerns of African American women as well.—Eugene
Holley Jr.
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In a discussion of "The
Body and Soul of Modernism" Carby reads Nicolas Murray's nude
photographs of Paul Robeson, as well as black male nudes by
other European and American artists, and argues that for these
modernists the black male body represented "essentialized
masculinity." However, because the black subject was unable to
"gaze back at the viewer," these photographic texts reproduced
"the unequal relation of power and subjection of their
historical moment" in the early twentieth century. Carby also
discusses Robeson's roles in Eugene O'Neill's
Emperor Jones and
All God's Chillun Got Wings, concluding that, in
contrast to the character Robeson portrays in
Oscar Micheaux's film
Body and
Soul, O'Neill utilized a "strategy of inwardness" to
present racialized emotional conflicts for Robeson's character,
rather than outward resistance and rebellion. Carby's notes
that, with his expanding political consciousness and increased
commitment to the advancement of the working classes worldwide
in the 1930s, Robeson rejected these types of roles.
Unfortunately, how these ideological changes were reflected in
Robeson's racial consciousness (was Robeson a "race man"?) are
left unexplored.
Carby describes the
authentic and inauthentic nature of the relationship between
ex-convict and folk singer
Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter and folklorist
John Lomax and his son
Alan. She believes that this unusual partnership
demonstrated an attempt to use "the aesthetics of the folk" to
create a "fictive ethnicity of blackness" that allowed the
incorporation of potentially threatening black males into the
national community. For
C. L. R. James the
cricket field
in England's colonial territories not only was the space where
"ideologies of masculinity" were put to the test, but also was
"the battleground out of which nationhood . . . [had to] be
forged." Carby argues that in James's
Beyond the Boundary (1963) and the novel Minty Alley
(1936), "intellectual practice, racial politics, and cricket
were . . . unquestioningly imagined within a discourse of
autonomous, patriarchal masculinity." In
Black Jacobins(1938)
James posits the existence of a "revolutionary black manhood
that, both individually and collectively, gives birth to an
independent black nation state."— African
American Review, Fall, 2000 by V.P. Franklin,
FindArticles
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 27 November 2008
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